The Boyle Heights Dumpster Fire
85 million pounds of meat now rotting just east of downtown
The largest dumpster fire on the planet is nearly extinguished today just east of downtown LA. Officially the fire was ‘knocked down’ several days ago, but until a few stubborn hot spots are fully snuffed, fire crews will remain on the scene and in command.
Reports of a blaze among a solar panel array on the rooftop of a 500,000 square foot Boyle Heights cold storage facility reached authorities around 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday, June 17, around the same time I snapped the below photo of my daughter, Arden River Baumgart. She was just four days old. It seems appropriate that within 96 hours of my spawn emerging from the womb the largest, foulest dumpster fire in recent human memory would erupt only a few miles away.
The name Arden is gender-neutral and nature-themed and means ‘high valley’ maybe, or ‘eagle valley’, or ‘great forest.’ The name would, on first glance, suggest an angelic being born of pristine rural highlands, the product of some pagan aerie far beyond the sunbaked pillars of downtown LA. Yet the name may also derive from the Latin ardere, meaning ‘burning’ or ‘fiery’. Perhaps it was little Arden, the ardent-hearted, whose passionate screams on the afternoon of June 17—utterly disconsolate at having her diaper changed for the fifteenth time—somehow started the fire at the cold storage facility a few miles away.
“The cause of this incident is not known and remains under investigation,” reads a statement on the website of Pearce Services, a subcontractor working on the solar panels at the time of the fire. The company admitted that four of their workers were on the roof when flames started.
“They attempted to try to extinguish it. They dialed 911, and it was off to the races,” Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Jaime Moore said during a press conference.
Nonetheless, “The cause of the fire is still unknown,” said LAFD spokesperson Jamie Stewart.
In my experience over the years living at Château Westmoreland, most fires in Los Angeles are started by people who are on meth and mentally ill who become frustrated after discovering I have failed to provide the alley dumpsters with a sufficient number of empty beer cans to justify a trip back across Beverly and Virgil to the Temple Recycling Center.
Indeed, there were months when the dumpster fires that started outside my window every time I sat down to write were so numerous and distracting that I eventually decided I should probably just start a blog and make them my main subject matter. Perhaps it all would have worked out better and we never would have brought Arden into the world if I had started to document the destruction in my alley years earlier—but something about the phrase ‘dumpster fire’ just felt so hackneyed, overplayed.
Indeed, those two words have taken on quite a career over the past ten years.
I remember the first frail flicker of synchronicity, that sudden weird feeling that world events and the trite ephemera of my life were coalescing in ways a little too neat. I was standing on the roof of Château Westmoreland, directly over our apartment unit, drinking a beer and talking to my mom Pam on the telephone. Christina and I had been living in the building about a year and a half then. It was early evening, late in the summer of 2016, and my mom Pam—a somewhat educated once-single mother from the suburbs of San Diego—was telling me how much she hated Hillary Clinton. She simply couldn’t vote for the witch. Donald Trump was a vicious bastard with small hands, she said, but—
“Don’t use that term,” I remember interrupting her. “I am a bastard, mom. Trump is just Satan.”
Pam was trying to translate some of Trump’s more inflammatory rhetoric into more palatable terms and that’s when I saw the pallid drifts lifting past the fire escape railing. Then I heard the crackling. A loud BOOM.
“Lemme call you back.”
I crossed toward the southeast corner of the building that offered a decent view of downtown and peered into a pit of swirling hellfire. It was the recycling container that held it. Blue exterior paint dripping away in phosphorescent flames, igniting the swastika-tagged IKEA mattress abandoned at its feet. Flurries of faux snow cast by burning Amazon Prime boxes kept blowing north toward the Public Storage Building. I stared down into the alley, transfixed by the beauty, until another shotgun BOOM! sent the shrapnel of an aerosol can whizzing past my temple.
Behold, I thought. Behold the beauty, in all its deadly flesh…
A dumpster fire. Yes.
There was one phrase that day on everyone’s lips, two words pumping through all the pupils glued to Twitter, a sudden trending spittle of slang that seemed to encapsulate the putrid nihilism of Donald Trump’s rising political star better than any other. And later on, after the 2016 election, when those two words kept buzzing through ever more dumbfounded mouths… they represented a real triumph for democracy.
The erudite elites who guard the hallowed gates of the English lexicon found themselves eventually forced to bow before an overwhelming mob majority.
In 2018, Merriam-Webster added to the dictionary the popular informal phrase—dumpster fire.
But burping Arden a week ago, doom-scrolling the news, World Cup soccer kicking on mute as she barfed on my shoulder, I didn’t want to write about the Boyle Heights disaster and I did not think of it as a dumpster fire—not until I read about the food.
Authorities were first informed that the building was full of bread. According to Los Angeles Fire Department Chief, Jaime Moore, "Initially it was reported to us that the majority of that product was bread and wheat products.”
The initial report appears to have been a bit of wishful thinking or, more likely, a temporary panic abating fib disseminated by the building’s all-star tenant, Lineage Logistics, the largest cold storage firm in the world, a publicly traded personhood that appears to have benefitted, at least up until last week, from a long lineage of health and safety violations—one of the most glaring being a recent 2024 fire that erupted, unfathomably, at the very same solar array atop the selfsame cold storage facility as the current Boyle Heights fire.
“It warrants a thorough investigation to see why there were two fires on the same roof over a two-year period,” attorney Will Sykes, who is helping Boyle Heights residents sue Lineage, told CBS News.
The 2024 fire occurred the same year that Lineage went public, raising $4.44 billion in the biggest IPO of 2024, growing exponentially from a single Seattle warehouse to the globe’s largest cold storage behemoth with over 500 temperature-controlled warehouses plopped across 19 countries.
The company’s founders Adam Forste and Kevin Marchetti, former Morgan Stanley investment bankers, currently appear on the Forbes billionaire list. And yet, standing on Union Pacific Avenue, staring at the open north-east walls of the warehouse, one wonders if throughout their rapid ascension, a few crucial corners were not cut.
It’s interesting for me to look at these photos of this flat panel building with broad chunks of its exterior ripped away by tractor claws, the interior of the structure too dangerous to enter after the flames slipped from the roof and slithered down into the dense insulating foam packed all throughout the building.
“We still cannot send firefighters into this building,” said Chief Moore. “It’s incredibly dangerous, and to be quite honest, we’re probably never going to send anyone into this building.”
It’s interesting to look at all those bays and cubes and racks hanging in the blackness, each one divided by dense layers of polyisocyanurate (ISO) foam sandwiched between sheets of corrugated steel that allowed the fire to just go on smoking and slowly baking, sealed off from the water cannons used on oil rigs that went on blasting around the building, unable to reach the molten middle of the warehouse, and somehow still protected from the massive helicopter water drops once the vast roof collapsed. It was mostly the foam—foam and plastic packaging and rotting wet food—that allowed the fire to go smoldering and creeping for over a week, releasing particles of unknown safety all over the Southland, suffocating Boyle’s Latino residents, and causing a large uptick in ER visits.
“These contain many particularly toxic components,” said Michael Jerrett, an environmental health professor at UCLA, “and we know little about how these mixtures affect health.”
It’s interesting. Those missing panels, the gaping black floors and burned-out compartments you can see from the building exterior—each one sits there like an open box in a storyboard, another blank line in a beat sheet awaiting some ticking-clock disaster thriller.
No doubt some jack off is already under contract cranking out a script based off the following real-life facts:
• Ignition begins on top of massive roof, completely out of reach from ground-level hose lines.
• Hundreds of active, live-wired commercial solar panels block physical access, creating an immediate electrocution hazard for roof crews.
• Thick foam insulation panels trap the fire’s thermal energy inside, transforming the building into a giant, self-contained oven.
• Ruptured high-capacity refrigeration lines release toxic ammonia gas and spark micro-explosions, forcing a total tactical retreat from the building.
• 56 lithium-ion forklifts begin to off-gas deadly hydrogen fluoride, threatening a catastrophic chemical flashover.
• The compromised roof collapses inward, burying the core of the fire beneath an impenetrable shield of twisted steel and solar debris.
• Industrial steel racks holding millions of pounds of food warp in extreme heat, creating an imminent threat of a vertical domino-effect collapse.
• Cardboard packaging and food absorb millions of gallons of firefighting water, doubling the structural weight on the verge of collapse.
But the jack off isn’t me. No. For me those open walls peel back the veil on something else, which would never sell, yet remains far scarier than any catastrophic warehouse fire.
If Warner Brothers ever consulted me, and they won’t, the first real unsettling thump of the film, its actual instigating event, happens well after the fire starts. It’s an atmospheric moment, and it ends in an image, a symbol, a puzzle…
Watch. A shaky handheld camera hangs close on the O2 tank of a skinny rookie. Call him Kevin. He’s played by Timothé Shallowmay. Before the firefighters make their full retreat, we see him wandering a little too far down one of those narrow lightless corridors that rise 60 feet on either side toward the rafters that burning and rumbling invisibly overhead. Chunks of solar panel rain around him. The gloom crackles with their bursting glass.
His headlamp weaves through the thickening smoke, its white beam lingering an extra beat on a pale and hulking mass mummified in miles of taut stretch wrap. The camera steadies as Kevin reaches out and starts to tug at the sparkling plastic pulled tight above the pallet, his yellow Kevlar glove thrashing and jerking now as he begins hacking with a crowbar, hurrying, prying through the layers of plastic, whispering “Shit,” while the crew keeps calling through the gloom, “Kevin, hurry up! Kevin, get back here!” until the camera at last lands on a strange symbol and holds.
It’s a sticker. USA flag colors in the shape of an interstate highway sign.
USDA Prime, it says.
Cut to: Kevin watches the fire chief on TV later that night.
Chief Jaime Moore did clarify during a press conference later, regarding all the wheat and bread, “we’re slowly learning as we get into this building that it’s far from that.” His voice continued reluctantly. “There’s a lot of meat products.”
85 million pounds of meat.
“Environmental hazards from industrial disasters too often fall on communities like Boyle Heights,” Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement.
But this is not an essay about Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, or baby Arden.
Tune in next week to find out what’s actually hiding inside that building, lost between all those factual story beats.
Spoiler—it’s not meat.
Except we really want it to be an essay about baby Arden <3
From one girl dad to another, congrats on having a beautiful baby daughter!